Further Education of a Packbat: Weird is Scary?

[packbat]

Warning: The below post may be disturbing to some (although, if I guess rightly, not to most of you), due to allusions to violence and sexuality and odd attitudes thereto. Will lj-cut on request.

This afternoon on DeviantArt, among the popular images was this sweet little image, painted with the artist's blood.

Upon my showing it to my roommates, I got two reactions: "He's a psycho. His girlfriend's going to die", and "Yeah, whoever did that is a f–g." (Mealy-mouthed ineffectual obfuscation of sexual ephitet courtesy me. Yay PC!)

This shocked me. Utterly. Because when I looked at it (and I guessed the painter was female, but I honestly don't know) I saw a ... well, I hesitate to use the term, given the potential for confusion, but some sort of Neopagan – in this case, a believer in some sort of special symbolism of nature and primitive rituals (primitive being purely non-derogatory here). The type of person who's gutsy enough to put off bandaging a smashed finger long enough to use it as an ink dispenser, but who's no more likely to commit murder than, say, the average deer hunter. Not enough even to encourage suspicion. (As for my bewilderment at the ephitet – well, that'll have to wait for another post.)

Thinking it over, I can understand why I was naive to expect that. In fact, thinking it over, I would flatly expect that reaction, had I thought about their worldviews before I spoke. But coming from my upbringing, and (to be honest) hanging out on the Web as much as I do, I seem to have somehow managed to broadened my schema of "people like me" so much that I forget that some of these people are actually scared of each other.

Comments

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't see an implied veneration of blood and therefore didn't get anything else from that. Interesting.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Well, to me, the tagline ("Say it sincerely... say it with blood") seems to imply (if not state flat-out) that blood is to be valued as an indicator of sincerity. 'Veneration' might be the wrong word, but that reads as an expression of a religious feeling to me.

[goblinpaladin.livejournal.com]

Ah, see, I just read that as being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a reference to the old stereotype of one's "heart's blood" in poetry and the like. Nothing religious at all.

Like I said, interesting.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Could be, could be. I know I tend to take the literal meaning – I'll try to remember that sometimes people aren't.